Effective disentanglement of measured system and measurement apparatus

Abstract

We consider a multi-level system coupled to a bosonic measurement apparatus. We derive exact expressions for the time-dependent expectation values of a large class of physically relevant observables that depend on degrees of freedom of both sytems. We find that, for this class, though the two systems become entangled as a result of their interaction, they appear classically correlated for long enough times. The unique corresponding separable state is determined explicitly. To better understand the physical parameters that control the time scale of this effective disentanglement process, we study a one-dimensional measurement apparatus.